BILL GRIFFITH

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.

Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

Zippy is living in the moment.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

Are we having fun yet?

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.